John Battelle's Search Blog

Predictions 2024: It’s All About The Data

John Battelle — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 20:48:00 +0000

Let’s talk 2024.

2023 was a down year on the predictions front, but at least I’ve learned to sidestep distractions like Trump, crypto, and Musk. If I can avoid talking about the joys of the upcoming election and/or the politics of Silicon Valley billionaires, I’m optimistic I’ll return to form. As always, I am going to write this post with no prep and in one stream-of-conscious sitting. Let’s get to it.

The AI party takes a pause. The technology industry – and by this point, the entire capitalist experiment – is addicted to boom and bust cycles and riddled with blinkered optimism. In 2023 we allowed ourselves to dream of AI genies; we imagined trillions in future economic gains, we invested as if those gains were a certainty. In 2024, we’ll wake up and realize – as we did with the web in the early 2000s – that there’s a lot of hard work to do before our dreams become a reality. I’m not predicting an AI crash – but rather a period of digestion, with a possible side of Tums. Corporations will find their initial pilots less impactful than they hoped, and when told of the sums they must spend to course correct, insist on cutting back. Consumers will become accustomed to genAI’s outputs and begin to rethink their $20 a month subscriptions. Growth will slow, though it will not stagnate. Regulators around the world will take the year to move past Terminator nightmares and into the hard work of deeply understanding AI’s societal impact. IP holders – artists, newspapers, craftspeople – will press their lawsuits and infuse the market with uncertainty and hesitancy. In short, society will take a pause that refreshes. And that will be a good thing.
But Progress Continues… It may feel like a pause, but below the tech media scorekeeping narrative, a growing ecosystem of AI startups will make important strides in areas that will matter beyond 2024. AI is driven by data, and as a society we’re not particularly good at structuring, governing, or sharing data. It makes sense that big companies with access to unholy amounts of structured data pioneered the AI era. (Of course, if you’re not a big company, and you want access to massive amounts of data, it helps to just take it without asking permission). But the AI-driven startups that will make waves in 2024 will do so by structuring discrete chunks of valuable information on behalf of very specific customers. It won’t make many headlines, but taken collectively, it’s this kind of work that will lay the groundwork for AI becoming truly magical.
Up and to the right, again?
Big Tech’s Mid-life Crisis. Perhaps I could call this “Big Tech’s mid-mid-life crisis,” because it’s been building for a few years now. It started with the techlash after Cambridge Analytica in 2018, got a temporary reprieve with the pandemic, but is back with a vengeance thanks to the law of large numbers. Every year it gets more difficult for the Amazons, Google, and Apples of the world to continue their ever-upward march. As the chart at left demonstrates, 2023 was a very good year for shareholders of big tech companies. And more likely than not, that will continue for 2024. But stress fractures are inevitable as market forces shift. Doctorow’s “enshittification” thesis will continue to play out. Consumers will grow ever more weary of hidden fees, creeping advertising, attention steering, and countless other ways the BigCos milk their competitive advantages so as to prop up investors’ profit expectations. Regulators, never first to any party, will continue to press their countless cases – scoring several big wins, particularly in the EU. But perhaps the most tectonic of shifts to emerge in 2024 will be in the very model that underpins Big Tech’s grip on consumers: Control of our data. Which brings us to…
Fediverse Rising. Why must we give shitty names to every good thing that happens on the Internet? The “fediverse” is, according to Wikipedia, “…a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”… is an ensemble of social networks which can communicate with each other, while remaining independent platforms. Users on different social networks and websites can send and receive updates from others across the network.” That doesn’t quite do the concept justice, but it’s a start. What really matters here isn’t whether your post (and your social network) on Threads can effortlessly travel to WordPress or Flipboard or, eventually, Instagram or TikTok. What truly matters here is how consumer expectations will shift toward a model where each of us is feels in control of our core public personae independent of any tech platform. And that shift has the potential to change not just our expectations of the content we share and consume, but our understandings of what constitutes an honest and fair value exchange with Big Tech. It’s strange to acknowledge that a huge driver of this shift will be Meta, which has already begun “federating” its Threads service. But let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth (and remember, it’s never a good idea to stand behind it, either.) Related: A bevy of fun social sites will pop up that become wildly popular, then disappear after a few months.
Apple Gets Bitten. Apple has a big year ahead. Its Vision Pro device is rumored to launch early this year, though it may prove more Newton than iPhone in its initial impact. Meanwhile, most of the tech world has woken up to a drum I’ve been banging for years: Despite posturing as anti-advertising and pro-privacy, Apple is a very large advertising company. If it wants to maintain its growth (and its margins) in 2024, Apple will have to grow that advertising business significantly. Advertising will no longer be a sideshow to its sexier device business; it will be a $10-15 billion juggernaut with 50-90-percent profit margins. That means all the negative energy, regulatory scrutiny, and consumer ick once reserved for Facebook and Google will turn its gaze westward to Cupertino. Add to that Apple’s multi-year lag in developing consumer AI tools, and, well, Apple’s going to have a forgettable year, even if it does manage to keep its stock propped up (like all of Big Tech, it most likely will manage to do that).
Bright Spots Emerge in Media. Wait, what?! The eternal media pessimist has something positive to say about his chosen field? Yes – but I’m not predicting a wholesale resurgence in media. Instead, I think the environment is ripe for smaller, high-quality publications to emerge. AI-driven made-for-advertising content will likely drive a stake into the already attenuated heart of “at-scale” publishers like G/O, Buzzfeed and Vice, and as high-quality voices begin to realize they’ve traded one corrupt platform for another (say, Buzzfeed for Substack), they’ll continue an emerging trend of banding together and creating professional outlets that can build true relationships with their audience. I’m not predicting the rise of a new magazine era here, but I do think the world is thirsty for trustworthy voices that go beyond a single influencer adept at riding the algorithmic waves of TikTok, YouTube, or Substack.
Cars Will Keep Their Drivers. Any of you have a friend who came back from San Francisco raving about how they took a Waymo or Cruise taxi, and it had to be the future of transportation? I’m here to tell you it’s not. Even if driverless tech was ready for prime time, municipalities – whose approvals matter more than state and federal governments – are decidedly not. Driverless cars raise far larger issues than most city governments are capable of addressing – including tough questions of morality, employment, class, liability, and politics, to name a few juicy ones. If you want to experience the future of transportation, I suggest you look into an e-bike.
Enterprise Data Moves Beyond Marketing. For as long as “big data” has been a thing, its main purpose in large companies has been to inform marketing campaigns. That’s because money follows utility, and over the past two decades we’ve built a massive ecosystem of data-driven marketing platforms (Google and Meta, of course, but also Amazon, Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, LiveRamp, etc). For nearly as long we’ve also heard promises that all that consumer data might be useful for more than just selling stuff. Why can’t the data from retail media networks inform supply chains, for example? Or why can’t customer marketing segments inform that same customer’s experience across all touch points? Anyone who’s worked on these problems knows they’re maddeningly difficult – in the main because of institutional and cultural barriers inside corporations. But this coming year we’ll see at least a few touchstone examples of data-driven applications from enterprise players that change the way B2B leaders consider justifying their investments in IT. And for once, it won’t be to make a marketing campaign more efficient.
The New York Times Loses Its Suit Against AI. News of this lawsuit hit as I was writing this post, and I’ll admit I’ve not yet read the complaint. However, I do know that if this suit gets to trial, the Times will be no match for the collective power of the conservative technology and political movements backing Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and their ilk. Regardless, the case will be a fascinating window into one of the most compelling power struggles of our era – between institutions once entrusted with gatekeeping Truth, and those seeking to bend it toward larger, if not entirely noble pursuits. Worth watching, even if the outcome feels pre-ordained.

I’m going to call it at nine this year. I’ve been writing for nearly four hours, and I’ve always stopped myself from overthinking this post. Here’s to all of you – thanks for reading this far, and let me know your thoughts. I’m @johnbattelle on Threads, jbat at battellemedia.com on email, or leave a comment here. Happy 2024!

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Predictions 21: How I Did

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Google’s “Left of Home” Newsfeed Gets Confused

John Battelle — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 15:29:17 +0000

It’s disconcerting when your phone doesn’t know you anymore.

I’ve had a Google phone for more than a decade, from its initial incarnation as the “Nexus” to its current apex form, the Pixel 8 Pro. Somewhere along the way, Google introduced a Google News feed “left of home,” that valuable real estate that smartphone users access by swiping right from the home screen. My old Pixels reliably gave me a newsfeed that, despite its wonkiness, gave me a respectable set of news stories patterned somewhat to my actual interests. Unfortunately, it seemed highly attuned to my search and location histories, so if I was buying headphones or reading about a wind farm off Rhode Island, my “news” stories would instantly shift to local news from Providence, or junky reviews of electronics I’d never want to buy. But it was worth putting up with, because it gave me useful news and information most of the time.

My new Pixel 8 (I got it for myself as a Christmas present!) effortlessly ported all my apps, and even most of my passwords and permissions, but when I checked my left of home newsfeed yesterday, it seemed to have utterly lost its way. Besides being convinced that I somehow have a fetish for stories like “Are McDonald’s Hotcakes Made Fresh Every Day” and “How Mike Tindall Became The Brother Prince William Needs,” the service began pushing sponsored stories at me with the urgency of an Instagram feed. It was a very strange feeling to realize my phone seemed to have utterly forgotten who I was.

Today I figured out what was wrong – somehow the feed was built on a secondary “burner” Google account I keep around for testing new services. My “battellemedia” service is a paid Google Workspace account, so once I reset my left of home newsfeed to battellemedia, things got back to normal. No ads, and better content. But it left me wondering – how long has Google run ads for personal accounts in that feed? Are they any good? Is it a good business for Google?

Eat Sleep Drink Dream – Flipping Work and Life For A Year

John Battelle — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 20:57:16 +0000

I will not forsake you. But I might not call as often as I used to.

I don’t often write about personal things here, but the two most-read posts of this past year were Mastering The Rudiments, about my journey with learning the drums, and Unretirement, a personal reflection on my career.

I wrote both of those back in May – a shoulder month between seasons. In May, the year hasn’t hardened into disappointment or routine, there’s still time to change course. Now that the year has passed, I’ve found myself wanting to Think Out Loud a bit, in particular about a goal I set for myself this year. In “Unretirement” I explained that after seven companies, I had decided to get off the startup train for good: “As any founder can tell you, being in charge of millions of dollars of invested capital and scores of trusting employees is exhausting.” What I didn’t mention was that I promised myself I’d not commit to anything full time – no new startup, to be sure, but also, no project of any kind that would dominate my time and warp reality in its wake. My goal was to simply…be.

Twelve months in, I find myself wondering: How’d that go? And, what, if anything, has changed?

***

I’ve been doing basically one thing for 35 years – starting companies. And even as I did that, I was manically spackling in projects like writing books, joining boards, investing in other startups, teaching, and running conferences. For most of the past few decades I was so damn busy that the world narrowed into an overburdened to-do list. The high priority items on that list – “Raise the B round” or “Close General Motors” – seemed so damn important that a lot of “life” got pushed to the periphery. Over time the non-work portion of life, even if dutifully minded and enjoined, well, it gets relegated. Yes, I have to go to the gym. Yes, I will call or possibly even visit my mother, who aged from a young 55 to a spry 90 over the course of my career. Yes, I will be at the soccer game, the birthday party, the parent-teacher meeting. But was I really there? I honestly can’t remember. In fact, one of the most remarkable things I’ve come to realize about the past few decades is how little of it I can actually recall. What the fuck is that about?

Oddly, the things I remember best are the parties. The time spent with family and friends where I let go, usually aided by liberal doses of alcohol and other social lubricants. Booze in particular became something of a short-term work-release program – I drank nearly every night, and damn, I got pretty good at it. Over the past year I had a good, long look at that crutch, and I’ll admit, it’s taken the better part of twelve months to change my relationship to it. If you’ve never Googled “How do I know I’m an alcoholic,” reviewed the Internet’s cold counsel, and quietly consigned uncomfortable truths to the darkest corner of your mind, well, good on you. I did a lot of that over the years.

So some things have changed. I didn’t stop drinking cold turkey this year, and despite America’s bipolar love affair with quitting, I don’t plan on joining that particular club. But I have built a more adult relationship with drinking. Post summer, I cut my intake roughly in half. I’m even trying to be entirely dry the first half of the week. So yeah, that’s a change. It helps that I’m no longer in a job that requires constant travel or going out nearly every night. It’s far harder to change when your colleagues are getting shitfaced at the same table as you.

As long as we’re getting personal, how I sleep, dream, and eat also changed this past year. I’m addicted to exercise – I rarely miss a day, and when I do I obsessively increase my workouts on either side of the break. But I’ve always felt I was carrying just a bit too much weight – the NIH body mass index put me just on the wrong side of “Overweight.” Sure, I could justify this as not accounting for muscle mass over fat, but that felt a lot like my justifications around alcohol. So I stopped eating in the morning – and got in the habit of preparing a good lunch at midday. We kept dinner pretty much the same. Presto, I went from 195 to 183 pounds in just a few months. The NIH now puts me comfortably inside “Normal.” I’m not sure why that NIH score matters to me, but it does. As one ages – a topic for another post – one tends to grow thicker. I wanted to buck that trend.

***

Early drafts of this post included hundreds more words on changes to my sleep habits, including a dip into the rabbit hole of dreams. But I started this post writing about work, about my decision to not commit to a full time project, and somehow ended up writing about drinking, eating and sleeping. Perhaps that’s the point – I’ve always sensed that my priorities were a bit mixed up, but during the course of this year, I finally felt what it meant to shift them around.

As I said at the top, I gave myself this entire year to reflect, to consider who and where I was in the world, and to not be driven by some all-encompassing Company or Project. Instead, I hoped to identify some things I wanted to change, perhaps finding new things I wanted to try along the way. Back in January a year seemed an appropriate amount of time given the work at hand. But it went…very quickly, and standing at the precipice of 2024, I can’t say I’ve come as far as I wished.

But the progress is there – by the numbers, certainly, and in the new habits I’ve picked up. Beyond the personal, my work has changed significantly. Before I left my last company I’d work at least 8-10 hours a day, often squeezing in an hour or two after dinner, and another hour in the midnight interregnum. These past few months I’ve averaged 6-8 hours, and that’s absolutely how it’s going to stay from now forward.

It’s taken an entire career to realize the obvious: The things that work makes possible are, in fact, the things that matter the most. What happens, I’m starting to wonder, if I relegate work, instead of the rest of life?

***

Yet still I work, and I enjoy it, most of the time. In the past few months I’ve picked up a number of new projects. The most significant is my recent commitment to Northeastern, where I’m attached both to the Burnes Center and the School of Journalism. I’m teaching a course on innovation in journalism business models, as well as doing research at Burnes on the history and possible futures of the Internet.

That research will most likely turn into a book of some kind – but I’ll keep the details of that project for another post. I’m also advising a number of projects in both the non-profit and for-profit world, as well as helping to stand up a new kind of gathering at the intersection of science, medicine, and longevity. I continue my work with P&G on Signal, which has been the longest running partnership of my career, and I keep my hand in media and tech through my board work with Sovrn and LiveRamp. No matter what I’m doing, I plan on writing out loud here, as much as I possibly can. I know long-form posting is passé, but to be honest, writing these posts is the best part of “work.” Thanks for coming along for the ride.

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Grading my 2023 Predictions: The Batting Average Dips

John Battelle — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 18:52:59 +0000

Well that was one hell of a year.

As I do each December, it’s time to grade my own homework. And the past twelve months certainly started out well. But unless a certain fascistic presidential candidate has a change of heart in the next few days (he won’t), I’m afraid I didn’t break .500 this year (last year I was smokin’ hot, I must say).

In any case, let’s get to it. Here’s a review of what I predicted, and my take on how it turned out.

ChatGPT finds a business model. Remember, this prediction came just six weeks post-launch, and given the company’s servers were melting from demand, there was a lot of speculation around whether OpenAI would or even could stand up reliable revenue streams. The company was being compared to early versions of Netscape, Google, and Facebook – and none of those breakouts had real business models in their first year. But OpenAI did in fact find its business model – selling its services to Microsoft, naturally, but also to millions of individual developers and consumers. While profitability is still over the horizon, OpenAI did become – as far as I can tell – the fastest business to a billion-dollar run rate in the history of the Internet. Not bad for year one, even with the goat rodeo at the end. I’d grade myself as getting this one right.
Google launches a ChatGPT-inspired search interface. In my post covering this prediction, I wrote that “Google will build a novel conversational interface to its flagship Google search application.” Months later, Bard launched as a sandboxed “experiment” (something I also predicted). This pasts Fall, Google put Bard, now powered by its more advanced Gemini model, into wide release. Many, many questions remain about how Google will manage its customer base in relation to Bard and its core search business, but again, I’d say I got this one right.
Microsoft launches “Enterprise Explorer.” Here’s what I meant by that: “Built, again, from a mashup of OpenAI technology and Microsoft’s Azure compute platform, E2 would address some of ChatGPT’s most annoying problems – its indifference to truth, for example, or the biases inherent to its Web-scale training corpus. The idea would be this: Train a specific ChatGPT instance on just the body of data owned or operated by a particular corporation.” So did they launch this kind of a service? Yes, they did. So far, I’m three for three.
There’ll be a war between the duopolies of Google/Facebook and Amazon/Apple. OK, maybe after more than 20 years of predictions, I’d learn not to overgeneralize. I mean, there’s always a war between these oligarchs, so…what’s different this time? Well, I predicted that both Apple and Amazon will grow their advertising businesses significantly, stealing share from Meta and Google. And indeed, that’s what happened. Forbes noticed it by April of 2023, and the Epic case said the quiet part out loud about Apple – which makes huge profits from its deal with Google. Beyond that, Apple is already close to a $10 billion annual run rate in its app store advertising business. I predicted a “war” – and in retrospect, I have no idea what that really means. But did Amazon and Apple steal growth from Google and Meta’s advertising business this past year? Absolutely. So I’ll take this one as a win.
Netflix will triumph. I predicted that by the end of the year – so right about now – the skepticism that prevailed in early 2023 around Netflix’s new advertising business would turn to rapture. I was wrong. Netflix is still finding its footing, and while I think long term, the company will have a big ads business, it didn’t mature as quickly as I expected this year. One of the company’s marquee hires, Jeremi Gorman, left after less than six months on the job, and the new President, Amy Reinhard, penned a pretty uninspiring one-year anniversary post highlighting…. measurement? The company also announced it has 15 million subscribers in their advertising tier, a big number in aggregate, but it’ll need to 10X that figure if it wants to build a truly scale business. We’ll see, but for now, I call this prediction a fail.
Twitter will rebound. Oh damn, how wrong can one person be? I predicted that Elon would tire of his toy and hire an ads-focused CEO (partial credit, I guess). I also said that “by the end of the year, the stories will about the miraculous rebirth of The Bird, because, well, that’s always been Twitter’s story.” What I didn’t foresee was Space Voldemort replacing the Twitter name with a letter in the alphabet, and turning the company, and the service I once loved, into a toxic cesspool that nearly everyone I respect has abandoned (I left over a year ago). Grade: Abysmal fail, and an abject lesson in not turning hopes into predictions.
Crypto will go sideways in ’23. Well, I was right for a few months, but then, somehow, the crypto markets shook off all the bad news and … went batshit, rising 85 (Ethereum) to 160 percent (bitcoin). No one seems to be able to predict what’s going to happen in crypto markets, and as of today, I’m going to stay out of that business. Grade: Fail.
Tesla will continue to tank. If you only read the headlines, you might conclude that I got this one right. After all, this is a company that failed this year in so many ways: Harassment lawsuits, massive recalls, wheels literally falling off. And yet – the damn stock nearly doubled this past year. It’s as if some evil cabal is manipulating the markets so as to preserve Elon’s wealth. As with Twitter and crypto, Tesla is an Elon economy play. So as I did with those, I’ll do with this: I’m bowing out of the Tesla prediction game, and I’ll take the L this year.
Tech IPOs will make a comeback. Well, you could argue this one both ways. On the one hand, the number of IPOs were up compared to 2022 – with Instacart, Mobileye, Arm, and Klaviyo as notable debuts. But as of today, only Mobileye and Arm are trading above their initial price. And big names like Databricks and Stripe, which were expected to debut this year, opted instead to keep their powder dry. In short, tech IPOs did make a comeback this year, but the market was a bit of a mixed bag. I’d grade this one a push.
Trump will pull out of the ’24 presidential race. Well shit, if wishes were fishes….I mean, there’s still a week left, right? Grade: Fail.

So that’s it. Five fails, four hits, and one push. A batting average of less than .500. Not my best year, to be sure. But some valuable lessons learned: I’m not a stock picker, crypto is inscrutable, and I need to avoid toxic subjects like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Keep your eyes out for my Predictions 2024, coming in a week or so. Let’s hope we all do better next year.

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Predictions 21: How I Did

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Advertising Is Coming To Threads. What Happens Next?

John Battelle — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 19:31:12 +0000

With thanks to Scott Monty

I stopped using Twitter over a year ago, as soon as Elon Musk took control of the place. I don’t miss it – it was already a pretty toxic place, and my tenure at The Recount, a political media company, ensured I had to engage with most of Twitter’s worst attributes.

But when Meta launched Threads, its Twitter clone, I figured I’d give the new service a try. I’d played around with Mastodon, but found it a bit sparse, and Meta’s commitment to the fediverse (still unfulfilled), plus its integration with Instagram (a built in network!) felt worth checking out.

I was early to the party (day one, I think), and over the past few months, Threads has become a pretty good alternative to the never-ending question of “what’s happening, now?” I used Twitter mostly for news, and Elon has been doing a bang-up job of driving journalists into Meta’s arms. As most Twitter refugees noted upon signing up, Threads felt far less toxic and much more welcoming than whatever “X” was becoming. Plus, Threads’ engagement – its comments in particular – seemed far more well intentioned.

But as soon as I started using Threads, I noticed something missing: There were no ads.

It’s normal for a new social media platform to launch without ads, but Threads is a social media platform from Meta, after all. Nearly six months and more than 100 million active users later, I’m pretty sure ads are coming to Threads soon. When they arrive, I’m afraid Threads’ rosy bloom will likely fade. Advertising injects often insidious economic incentives into social networks, and lays traces for all manner of corrosive and well-documented behaviors. New signals inform the platforms’ algorithmic choices of what to show us; new revenue streams encourage bad actors to create spam farms, click bait, fake accounts, and worse.

But there are proven ways to combat these inevitabilities. Were I at Threads, I’d take a hard look at an innovation first launched at Twitter way back in 2012. It’s called Amplify, and I wrote about it at length back in 2020. Amplify was invented to encourage media companies to bring their content onto Twitter during a period when everyone was pivoting to video. From my 2020 post:

Amplify has a unique model that fundamentally changes the power relationships between players in the media ecosystem. Most who use it give those fundamental changes little thought – they just see Amplify as a partnership tool, pure and simple. But once you grok Amplify’s unique approach, you realize its potential is wildly overlooked.

… Amplify allows the marketer to use Twitter’s massive investment in advertising technology and audience development to define what audience it wants to reach, and then use a media company’s editorial as a lure to draw that audience through its marketing messaging. Let that sink in: The marketer – not the media company, not the platform, but the marketer – is responsible for putting the audience together with editorial.

As the CEO of a video-based media company in 2020, I was a huge, if obviously biased, proponent of Amplify. It struck me as a way to change the power dynamics in social media – and a way to get journalism outlets paid. For a while, Amplify was a significant percentage of online revenue at places like Bloomberg, Reuters, and CNN. It gave brands a way to support editorial and entertainment outlets that they felt were aligned with their values. And it worked – every campaign The Recount ever ran using Amplify beat marketing benchmarks that mattered to the client.

One of the chief complaints I hear about Threads is that it lacks the real time cultural vibes that Twitter had at its apex. Integrating an Amplify-like advertising product into Threads seems like a smart way to continue Meta’s feature-by-feature conquest of Twitter’s former glory.

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Why Prime Time TV Might Make a Comeback

John Battelle — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 15:56:46 +0000

I hate to admit it, but I miss prime time.

For those of you born after Seinfeld went off the air, “prime time” dominated an era when television viewers only had three or four choices at any given time. Before streaming took over our devices, before cable devolved to 500 channels with nothing to see, there was “prime time television.” If you’re old enough to remember when Friends ruled “Must-See TV,” you (and tens of millions of others) likely spent a fair amount of your weeknights engaged with prime time’s three-hour post-dinner programming block.

Prime time once acted like a national water cooler – offering a shared set of conversation (and argument) starters. At its peak, 20-30 million of us watched shows mirroring a conformed, but often entertaining brand of American homogeneity. The situational comedy format ruled, but there was also the procedural (CSI, SVU), the news serial (48 Hours, Dateline), and the casually subversive (The Simpsons, Twin Peaks).

There’s plenty of reasons to celebrate prime time’s demise – the lineup almost always projected a distorted, white-male dominated version of American life, and most of its offerings were, well, terrible compared to the cornucopia of quality shows that can be found across today’s streaming universe (does anyone mourn the loss of Models Inc.?).

But…more and more, I find myself wishing for a prime time comeback. Why? I think it boils down to the cognitive and social tax that the streaming landscape exacts on all of us. Sure, there will always be people who love to navigate the endless obstacles between our desire to watch TV and our ability to do so. But those are probably the same folks who use Linux on their desktop machines. For the rest of us, streaming is just…a terrible experience.

Unless you’re lucky (or mid-binge), finding anything to watch is just too much work. The first ten to fifteen minutes of “watching TV” invariably involves hunting for something to watch, figuring out how to navigate the endlessly terrible streaming service’s user interface, dealing with endless technical and password cruft, finding a show you might want to check out, watching for a few minutes, not liking it, then repeating the process, sometimes cycling between four or five different streaming apps. More often than not, we end up settling for something – anything – on Netflix – even if it’s terrible. Netflix is winning for one simple reason: It always has something on; it’s become the last refuge of an exhausted television consumer who just wants to hang up their brain and forget about the world for a bit. Put another way, there’s a reason streaming sucks: Its shitty interface dulls our expectations and steers us to watch just about anything.

Even if streamers aren’t motivated to fix their products’ terrible experience, market economics might just force them to do it. For all but a few services (Netflix, possibly Hulu/Disney), today’s streaming landscape has become an economic smoking crater. “Second tier” services like Peacock, Paramount+, and Max are losing billions of dollars and fighting a battle of scale that they can’t win. Many in Hollywood have realized they’re terrible at acquiring and retaining actual customers – they’re used to outsourcing that to distributors (and airwave or cable monopolies). And they are also terrible at technology: Besides failing at UX/UI, they’ve also failed their advertising customers, none of which are currently happy with the state of “connected TV” advertising technology (turns out, the main reason “personalized advertising” doesn’t work in streaming is that media companies refuse to support open standards for measurement, audience data, and inventory sharing).

But the one thing that Hollywood used to be good at – programming – could prove to be their salvation. A few weeks ago during what used to be “prime time,” I fired up Max – the app’s nearly unusable, but I really wanted to watch Barry – and I was greeted with a promotion for the National League Championship Series – and it was live. All I had to do was click once, and I was watching live playoff baseball. It felt like a revelation – and a welcome shot of deja vu. Suddenly I was not only engaged with content I liked, I also felt connected to a larger community of people who were doing what I was doing: watching something important together.

As I watched, I found myself wanting to peruse a few other live options – not 500, mind you, but just three or four of the best, most promising shows that were on right now. Of course this is the opposite of how most streaming services work – but I was longing for someone to just pick a good live lineup and present it to me. In other words, I wanted prime time back. If Peacock, Max, and Paramount+ picked a great prime time lineup, added a few bells and whistles (watch from the beginning, save for later, etc), and presented that lineup as “must see TV” each night, I’m pretty sure they could amass significant audiences, and by extension, major advertisers would clamor to be part of the fun.

Hey, just like with the news business, a guy can dream. What do you think?

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Why Is The News Business So Terrible?

John Battelle — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 18:17:31 +0000

“A collage of iconic news industry brands and related imagery like newspapers, radios, televisions, and web pages in a dumpster, on fire, digital art”

It’s been nothing but bad news for “the news” lately, and this week piled on two more depressing headlines: Gallup released a poll showing American confidence in the validity of mainstream news media is at an all time low, and The New York Times filed a trend piece noting that Silicon Valley companies, once a font of traffic for journalistic enterprise, are “ditching” news sites. Turns out that with link taxes, content moderation nightmares, advertising blacklists, and consumer fatigue, “news” is just more trouble than its worth for our modern attention merchants. Even Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, has decided to downplay the role of current events on its platform.

For those of us in who’ve been in the news business for more than a minute, this story ranks as a classic “dog bites man” story. The Times‘ piece turns on the news that Meta’s point person for news, Campbell Brown, is leaving the company. But anyone who’s worked with Brown over the past few years was already in on the joke. Brown was hired in 2017 to put a familiar face on Facebook’s tumultuous relationship with the press. Back in early 2019, when we were just starting The Recount, she was refreshingly direct with me when I asked if I should invest in a relationship with Facebook. In short, the answer was no.

The Recount went on to partner with Twitter, which back then was still the center of the online news universe. That partnership showed some promise for a few months, but our job was to cover the news, and the news was grim: Trumpism, pandemics, racially motivated murders – not exactly the kind of stuff that draws advertising dollars. And then Elon Musk came along. We merged The Recount with another news startup – one that wasn’t as focused on US politics – and for the past year, I’ve been happily not running a news business (and happily off Twitter, as well).

But I can’t stop thinking about what’s gone wrong with our collective relationship to “the news.” What is it about the craft of telling people the truth that makes for such a shitty business?

Turns out, I’ll have to have at least a few decent answers to that question, and soon: I’m teaching a class on the business models for news at Northeastern starting early next year. It won’t be my first attempt at instilling young journalists with a sense of what they’re up against when it comes to business, as I taught pretty much the same class twenty years ago at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Then again, social media didn’t exist in 2003, and while print media was on the decline, it wasn’t yet considered dead and buried.

Since then, more than 25,000 journalism jobs have been lost in local newsrooms. As that decline steepened, I launched or invested in over a dozen more news-related companies, none of which moved the needle. It remains next to impossible to find reliable support for innovative approaches to quality journalism. There are plenty of examples of success in what might broadly be called “news” – but precious few when you narrow the parameters to “hard news” – the day to day grind of beat journalism.

So what can be done about it? As you might expect, there are no easy answers. But here are a few approaches that newsrooms are taking, all of which are complicated by one simple reality: When people say they want the truth, they tend to want to hear their preferred version of it. And that leaves precious little room for fact-based journalism.

Make a go of it as a for-profit entity. Historically, this is how most newsrooms have been funded. Back when news outlets owned a monopoly on an audience attention and could command both advertising and subscription revenue, this model worked extraordinarily well. As we all know, the Internet has blown apart the information ecosystem. Consumers stopped paying for information they could get for free on the Web, and advertising revenue followed its audiences to Instagram, Google, and the Weather.coms of the world. Digital publications adapted by embracing events, commerce, content mills, soft news (to mollify advertisers), and premium subscriptions, but when your core expertise is news, it’s hard to be good at much else. National brands with established audiences (the Times, the Journal, the Washington Post) managed to grow during the digital transition, and cable and local television news outlets are still pumping out ads for pharmaceuticals, but for anyone else… All I can say is good luck, and godspeed.
Make a go for it as a for-profit entity, but go niche. A time-tested strategy in the post-digital news business is to focus on becoming indispensable to a niche audience willing to pay for your reporting acumen, as well as the niche advertisers who want to reach them. That’s the strategy behind the much-lauded site The Information, which covers technology, or Skift, which focuses on the travel industry. It was our strategy with Wired, The Industry Standard, Federated Media, Sovrn, NewCo, and even The Recount (our niche was politics). Of course, there are issues with this approach: Industry-focused sites are often too cozy with their industry colleagues, resulting in either conscious or unconscious bias in coverage. Plus, the point of “hard news” is to cover events that by definition are not niche – local government, school boards, the police beat and so on.
Get a Substack. There are myriad examples of independent journalism succeeding at the micro-niche level – Judd Legum’s Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, Bari Weiss’ Common Sense. But a perusal of any of these newsletters belies their biggest problem: the author plays oracle and evangelist to a particular paying audience – leaving them open to well-founded charges of bias. Plus, one-person newsrooms do not scale as a matter of course. As soon as you start to scale up – as Weiss is attempting to do with The Free Press, well, you’re back to to all the other options on this list, with all their attendant problems.
Make the government pay for it. Believe it or not, a significant portion of liberal democracies have instituted some form of government funding scheme to underwrite journalistic organizations, though they mostly support television and radio broadcasts (then again, those organizations tend to also include online formats). The most well-known of these is the UK’s Television License, but similar approaches are in force in many European countries, as well as Japan, South Korea, and South Africa, among others. Steven Waldman, the CEO of respected local journalism non-profit Report for America, recently argued that investing government money into local journalism would pay for itself many times over, because journalists often uncover the kind of graft, fraud, and self-dealing that impoverishes the communities they cover. Could it happen? Alas, I don’t think so. Given most Americans can’t even agree on whether or not a particular candidate won the 2020 presidential election, the idea that we might collectively agree to fund journalism at a national level feels like a non-starter. Not to mention, as a group, journalists aren’t particularly fond of being reliant on government largesse.
Ask the rich people to pay for it. Absent government action, funding for innovative journalism has fallen mostly to philanthropists, motivated as they are by a complicated mix of good intentions, political ambition, tax deductions, and ego. That’s how Report for America funds more than 300 local journalists around the world, and it’s how the Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica, and the Center for Investigative Reporting win their Pulitzers. And while they’re not non-profits per se, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Time – all storied journalistic brands – are owned by what might charitably be called mostly benevolent billionaires. Unfortunately, expecting good-hearted plutocrats to prop up journalism is not a model that scales, nor is it a particularly stable long-term proposition free of potentially crippling conflicts of interest. While philanthropy is at the heart of countless smaller journalistic efforts like The SF Standard, alas, not every city has a resident Michael Moritz who’s willing to fund a pack of journalists eager to beat up City Hall.
Ask the corporations to step up. If you believe journalism is fundamental to democracy, and democracy is fundamental to stable economies, and stable economies are fundamental to business, why not ask corporations to step up and fund journalism as part of their commitment to corporate social responsibility? All I can say to this idea is…it will never happen. Companies are nothing if not political actors, and as political actors, they are terrified of angering one side or another in our polarized society. Given that “the news” is believed to be an “enemy of the State” by nearly 30 percent of our electorate, the Boards of the Fortune 500 will never step up and support journalism, no matter how much they might hand wave in panels at Davos.

So where does that leave us? Facing a paucity of good options, I’m afraid. Of all of them, I’m partial to the idea of government funding, regardless of its complications. No matter what, however, I remain optimistic, for reasons I can’t quite explain (Insanity? Encroaching old age? Bourbon?). Perhaps it has something to do with the quote from The Atlantic’s executive editor at the end of that Times piece on tech platforms “ditching” the news business. “Direct connections to your readership are obviously important,” she told the Times. “We as humans and readers should not be going only to three all-powerful, attention-consuming megaplatforms to make us curious and informed.” Perhaps, just perhaps, a pendulum is starting to swing, and audiences will begin to tire of the consequences of being poorly informed.

One can dream, no?

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Don’t Sleep on the EU’s Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts

John Battelle — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 18:50:14 +0000

(This is a preview of a piece I’m working on for Signal360, to be published next week.)

“The US litigates, the EU legislates.” That’s what one confidential source told me when I asked about the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the European Union’s twin set of Internet regulations coming into force this year. And indeed, even as the United States government continues an endless parade of lawsuits aimed at big tech, the EU has legislated its way to the front of the line when it comes to impacting how the largest and most powerful companies in technology do business. It may be tempting to dismiss both the DSA and the DMA as limited to only Europe, and impacting only Big Tech, but that would be a mistake. It’s still very early – much of the laws’ impact has yet to play out – but there’s no doubt the new legislation will drive deep changes to markets around the world. And even if you aren’t a digital platform, your own business practices may well be in for meaningful change.

So what do the DSA and DMA do? Both pieces of legislation target “big tech” – most of the targeted companies are in the US – and require them to enact novel forms of accountability for how both consumers and businesses interact with digital services. The DSA, which came into force in August, targets “very large online platforms” with more than 45 million users in the EU – sites like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Apple’s App Store, Bing, Google Search, Microsoft’s Bing and LinkedIn, Snap, Twitter, and TikTok. The DSA’s goal is to define online services’ responsibilities related to content moderation, including new rules around use of algorithms and data, user choice, annual audits for compliance, and advertising to minors. In short, the DSA seeks to make the Internet a safer and more transparent place to shop, do business, and be entertained.

The DMA came into effect this past May, and focuses on “unfair” and anti-competitive behavior by the largest companies on the web – what the EU calls “gatekeepers.” These include Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Meta. Many of the DMA’s provisions address the same behavior that has prompted various US agencies and states to sue – Apple’s refusal to allow competitive app stores, for example, or Amazon and Google’s alleged practice of favoring their own products and services over those of competitors. Under the DMA, Apple and Google can no longer force app makers to use their app stores, for example. Platforms are required to share data with their customers, obtain explicit opt-in consent to use data across services, design systems that are interoperable, and are barred from using their data to gain competitive advantage.

That means search results for just about every major platform in the EU – whether it be Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and even Meta, will be changing soon. “We are still at the level of philosophy,” as to how those changes might look, said one tech company insider who asked to remain anonymous. “The laws are not yet being enforced.” But what’s certain, he continued, was that “we need to provide new choices and spaces for consumers and competitors.”

The two pieces of legislation are dense with theory and explication, but the core intent is clear. As the DMA puts it, large online platforms have led to “serious imbalances in bargaining power and, consequently, to unfair practices and conditions for business users, as well as for end users of core platform services provided by gatekeepers, to the detriment of prices, quality, fair competition, choice and innovation in the digital sector.”

In short, the EU isn’t messing around. Importantly, the new laws require that platforms be in compliance by early next year, and they must continue to prove compliance on an annual basis. And the laws create full time regulators responsible for enforcement and fines, which are steep – up to 10 to even 20 percent of a company’s EU turnover. That means tech companies can’t see fines as a cost of doing business. Net net: a lot is going to change over the next two quarters.

So how might the new laws change business for non-tech companies, both inside and outside the EU? The most direct impact will be for marketers – if you’re targeting children under 18, you’ll lose access to that personalized data on all major platforms. You may also lose cross-service data – between Google Maps and YouTube, for example – if companies like Google fail to get explicit opt in from their customers.

In addition, the DSA requires that platforms create up-to-date repositories of data on advertising purchases, exposing the strategies and investment levels of every advertiser on the platform. “The DSA requires us to give almost live information about the amount of money being spent on ads,” said the tech company insider. “I think that will be interesting for marketers.” Indeed it will be – that kind of information was previously considered top secret, and will certainly re-shuffle go-to-market strategies for most CMOs.

If you’re a vendor on Amazon, for another example, you’ll suddenly find yourself free to compete on a more level playing field. The threat of Amazon using its data to undercut you on pricing, or to create and market a generic version of your branded product, is now gone in Europe. “Amazon is not going to be able to use data from other shampoo makers to compete against P&G,” said Fiona M. Scott Morton, the Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management. “And P&G will have access to tools to access, evaluate and track advertising that they place on site,” allowing the company to evaluate how their investments are performing relative to historic and industry norms.

But the true impact of the DSA and DMA may be in how the overall business ecosystem adapts over time, and this is where it pays to imagine a few out-of-the-box scenarios. Imagine, for example, that the DSA and DMA work well in the EU, and companies of all sizes begin to demand similar types of affordances in the other large markets. Might legislators adopt similar regulations once they are pressured by the likes of P&G, Walmart, or Nestle? It’s possible, says Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. More likely than not, “whatever big picture changes they make to appease EU regulators will end up being done globally.”

Beyond the potential for the DMA and DSA to become de facto standards outside the EU, there are also subtle, insistent market pressures to consider. Prior to the regulations taking force, no company – whether startup or large platform – would have ever attempted to create an app store that competed with Apple. But now, “Facebook could just create an advertising program that directly installs apps on a person’s phone, bypassing Apple altogether,” points out the tech company insider. Apps installed in this fashion would not pay Apple’s 30 percent tax on app revenue – a powerful new incentive for entrepreneurs to innovate.

In short, don’t sleep on the EU’s new DSA and DMA regulations – they will not only change how consumers interact with large platforms, they may also end up changing the rules of business on the Internet for good.

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On AI: What Should We Regulate?

John Battelle — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 18:18:39 +0000

EU classification of AI risk.

I’ve been following the story of generative AI a bit too obsessively over the past nine months, and while the story’s cooled a bit, I don’t think it any less important. If you’re like me, you’ll want to check out MIT Tech Review’s interview with Mustafa Suleyman, founder and CEO of Inflection AI (makers of the Pi chatbot). (Suleyman previously co-founded DeepMind, which Google purchased for life-changing money back in 2014.)

Inflection is among a platoon of companies chasing the consumer AI pot of gold known as conversational agents – services like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s BingChat, Anthropic’s Claude, and so on. Tens of billions have been poured into these upstarts in the past 18 months, and while it’s been less than a year into since ChatGPT launched, the mania over genAI’s potential impact has yet to abate. The conversation seems to have moved from “this is going to change everything” to “how should we regulate it” in record time, but what I’ve found frustrating is how little attention has been paid to the fundamental, if perhaps a bit less exciting, question of what form these generative AI agents might take in our lives. Who will they work for, their corporate owners, or …us? Who controls the data they interact with – the consumer, or, as has been the case over the past 20 years – the corporate entity?

That’s why I think Tech Review’s interview with Suleyman is required reading. Suleyman is a new author – his book The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma came out earlier this month (I’ve ordered it, but not yet read it). In the interview, Suleyman is asked why he’s excited about the Large Language Model (LLM) technologies driving companies like OpenAI and Inflection. His response bears quoting at length:

The first wave of AI was about classification. Deep learning showed that we can train a computer to classify various types of input data: images, video, audio, language. Now we’re in the generative wave, where you take that input data and produce new data.

The third wave will be the interactive phase. That’s why I’ve bet for a long time that conversation is the future interface. You know, instead of just clicking on buttons and typing, you’re going to talk to your AI.

And these AIs will be able to take actions. You will just give it a general, high-level goal and it will use all the tools it has to act on that. They’ll talk to other people, talk to other AIs. This is what we’re going to do with Pi.

That’s a huge shift in what technology can do. It’s a very, very profound moment in the history of technology that I think many people underestimate. Technology today is static. It does, roughly speaking, what you tell it to do.

But now technology is going to be animated. It’s going to have the potential freedom, if you give it, to take actions. It’s truly a step change in the history of our species that we’re creating tools that have this kind of, you know, agency.

Finally, someone talking out loud about the same things I’ve been on about for … too long: A massive shift in how humanity interacts with computing, from keyboards and poking at tiny mobile screens to the one thing we’re naturally quite good at: Dialog. I’ve called this the “conversational interface” for more years than I care to document, and I share Suleyman’s excitement about what this might mean for society. But alas, the interview never gets to the heart of the matter: the data rights model underpinning this shift to a conversational economy.

Instead, the interviewer rightly presses Suleyman on the potential downsides of an AI having “agency” – shouldn’t we regulate it, he asks? It’s here that I find Suleyman’s answers get a bit … optimistic. “I think everybody is having a complete panic that we’re not going to be able to regulate this,” he says. “It’s just nonsense. We’re totally going to be able to regulate it. We’ll apply the same frameworks that have been successful previously.”

Er…the history of regulation digital platforms, particularly here in the US, is notoriously ineffectual. Suleyman is pressed (and fact checked) on his assertions that “We’ve done a pretty good job with spam. You know, in general, [the problem of] revenge porn has got better, even though that was in a bad place three to five years ago. It’s pretty difficult to find radicalization content or terrorist material online. It’s pretty difficult to buy weapons and drugs online.”

Damn, I bet Suleyman will wish he hadn’t uttered those words. In any case, he and most other leading AI executives are begging national and international regulatory bodies to quickly pass frameworks for AI regulation. And for his part, Suleyman seems to think they’ll be up to the task.

I tend to disagree. Not because I think regulators are evil or stupid or misinformed – but rather because a top-down approach to something as slippery and fast-moving as generative AI (or the internet itself) is brittle and unresponsive to facts on the ground. This top down approach will, of course, focus on the companies involed. But instead of attempting to control AI through reams of impossible-to-interpret pages of regulation directed at particular companies, I humbly suggest we should focus on regulating the core resource all AI companies need to function: Our personal data. This is a thesis I’m currently working up – and have written about extensively over the past two decades – but may well prove the most flexible and effective. It’s one thing to try to regulate what platforms like Pi or ChatGPT can do, and quite another to regulate how those platforms interact with our personal data. The former approach stifles innovation, dictates product decisions, and leads to regulatory capture by large organizations. The latter sets an even playing field that puts the consumer in charge.

The Sites That Never Get Built: Why Today’s Internet Discourages Experimentation

John Battelle — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 21:56:44 +0000

The Dude knows the pitfalls of scattering a loved ones’ ashes…

Every so often I get an idea for a new website or service. I imagine you do as well. Thinking about new ideas is exciting – all that promise and potential. Some of my favorite conversations open with “Wouldn’t it be cool if….”

Most of my ideas start as digital services that take advantage of the internet’s ubiquity. It’s rare I imagine something bounded in real space – a new restaurant or a retail store. I’m an internet guy, and even after decades of enshittification, I still think the internet is less than one percent developed. But a recent thought experiment made me question that assumption. As I worked through a recent “wouldn’t it be cool” moment, I realized just how moribund the internet ecosystem has become, and how deadening it is toward spontaneous experimentation.

So let’s start with the idea itself. I was watching an episode of And Just Like That… the other day with my wife. Yes, I know, but sometimes you want to turn off your brain, OK? Anyway, there’s a scene where Carrie Bradshaw scatters her husband’s ashes into the Seine. She chose the bridge where her husband “Big” professed his love, ending a series-long on again, off again affair and beginning what became an apparently blissful marriage in the years between Sex and the City and the sequel which came some 15 years later. In any case, it reminded me of several similar scenes that I’ve been a part of over the past few decades (not to mention one of the best scenes in The Big Lebowski, but I digress…).

Back in the early 1990s my best friend’s dad died, and a group of us scattered his ashes at the top of Mammoth Mountain, where all of us loved to ski. Just last year I traveled back to the Bay area to scatter my father’s ashes on San Francisco Bay. And my mother has left me instructions as to where she wants her ashes scattered – half at the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the other half interred in her family plot on Martha’s Vineyard, where a stone will mark her name forever (or as long as these stones last, which seems to be between 150 and 300 years, judging by the older headstones I’ve seen there).

It’s that “forever” designation that got me thinking. For my best friend’s father, and for mine, there’s no chance of “forever” happening. Neither has a gravestone, their memory will die with their children. Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought, if you could drop a pin at the location where you scattered their ashes, leaving a memorial inscription, key biographical information, and whatever else you cared to add in a kind of virtual grave marker? And further, wouldn’t it be cool if anyone could use their phone to find those virtual graves? I imagined cities and countrysides inhabited by generations of lingering spirits – and in time, perhaps future versions of social and search platforms would surface this “memorial layer” of our world through augmented reality systems. Wouldn’t it be cool to know whose spirit was released in your neighborhood or favorite spot? Maybe after a few more turns of the generative AI wheel, you could engage in conversation with the avatar of someone long dead. It’s the kind of idea that gets you thinking, if nothing else. Let’s call this idea Scatter Plot for now – an idea needs a name, even if it’s a bad one.*

Once I fell for Scatter Plot, I got to thinking about how to actually bring it to life. Sure, you could build a website, but without integration into Apple and Google’s app stores, the idea is dead on arrival. Both offer deep integrations with their native operating systems, access to specialized hardware and sensors, and much more. I imagined that the loved ones scattering the ashes would want to take videos of the event and attach that media to the virtual marker, and from past experience, trying to develop a non-native web experience enabling even that simple act outside of Apple and Google’s walled gardens is frustratingly difficult.

That means if I were dead-set on launching Scatter Plot, I’d have to build native apps for both iOS and Android – and probably an open web mobile implementation that bridges them both. That means three separate development efforts, increasing both my costs and the complexities of building out my initial idea. While the idea is dead simple, executing it on a lark already feels out of reach – my back of the napkin math estimates development costs of at least a hundred thousand bucks, assuming I want it to be good enough to possibly catch fire with users.

That kind of seed capital forces one to think about business models. If Scatter Plot is done really well, and becomes “a thing” the way, say, Foursquare or Strava did, I could imagine millions of folks might start using the app. To give it the best chance of hitting, I’d probably want to take a freemium model: it could be free to drop a virtual grave marker, but we’d charge for added features like video or longer obits. We’d probably not want to do a subscription service – a one time fee, like at a real cemetery, is probably the right way to go. In time, maybe I’d integrate Scatter Plot with an LLM and offer an upgrade to that dead-person avatar feature, and that could run a SaaS model. But to start, if I could just get the UX right, nail my GTM strategy, find the right WOM influencers … I could imagine launching a business that converts 1-2 percent of my free users each year – at, say, ten bucks a pop, that’d mean $100,000 per million users – not a lot, but not nothing either. But while that $100,000 theoretically would cover my initial costs, it doesn’t pay for my time, and it’s a long, uncertain road to that first million users. It might take several years to get that right.

I started modeling revenue streams in my head, but then reality intervened. I realized that for every dollar I might take in through my Android or iOS app, I’d have to cough up 30 cents just for the right to be distributed on their platforms. Then I’d have to pay more to get the app noticed through app store paid search. That’s a steep tax to pay on top of the already increased operating expenses of developing for three distinct platforms. While it might make sense for large scale apps, where tens of millions is at stake, or for one-and-done point solutions that are cheap to build, Scatter Plot would likely live in the dead middle of that spectrum, and that 30 percent take rate, plus high distribution and marketing costs, would likely kill its chances of ever making any serious money, at least in the first few years of scaling. So scratch the idea of getting VC financing to cover those initial costs – the idea’s simply not big enough to justify the investment.

Back in the go go Web 2 days, when apps were new and pretty much any idea with a pulse could get funding, there was an explosion of new kinds of apps and services. This was when the app store platforms were new, and folks weren’t yet wise to the realities of an internet controlled by two or three massive corporations. I bet Scatter Plot could have found funding in 2010, but now? Not so much. And while it’s likely not as good an idea as I might think, it’s a fine example of the kind of experimentation that is simply not happening anymore, thanks to the sterility of the app store monocultures currently strangling the serendipity once found across the open web.

*Turns out, there’s a rudimentary, open-web based version of this idea in the UK. It’s…cool in a 2005 kind of way…